By LISA RATHKE, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, July 23, 2003

PLAINFIELD, Vt. -- Loona Brogan was driving the back roads one day when she spotted a colossal black willow tree. She raced back to town to tell everyone. It was the fattest willow she'd ever seen.

This spring, she and a county forester stretched a 100-foot tape measure around the tree's gnarled girth and used quick geometry to determine its height.

The tree measured 34 feet around -- although there's still some question if it has one trunk or two -- and 54 feet tall, making it one of the biggest trees in Vermont.

That came as no surprise to Brogan, who knows many of the state's grandest trees. Two years ago she founded the Vermont Tree Society, a group and Web site formed to celebrate and inventory the state's largest trees.

Now the Vermont Tree Society has 70 members, including professional foresters, naturalists, loggers and people who just love trees, like Brogan does.

"They represent the passing of time," she says. "An old tree is really humbling. It's been around a lot longer than sometimes the town that it's growing in and not just the people that live there."

The 107 trees on Vermont's big tree list rise from back yards, on riverbanks, hillsides and deep in the woods. The group is sketching a big tree map so others can find trees such as the 84-foot black ash in Morrisville, the 86-foot quaking aspen in Weston and a 126-foot Norway spruce in Woodstock. A team plans to visit the 40 most impressive trees this summer, gather their location coordinates and gain permission to map the giants.

That goes for the state's largest tree -- a 124-foot eastern cottonwood on farmland in Colchester. Height does not necessarily make it the largest tree. Width and crown spread also determine the size.

Vermont even has two of the largest trees for their species in the country. A 34-foot roundleaf shadbush in Clarendon and a 92-foot European larch can be seen from the road in Northfield though neither is a particularly tall species.

"It's unusual for Northeast states to have any, to be frank," Brogan says of the national champions. "The trees that are native here don't get that big."

They can't compete with the coastal redwoods in California that tower to more than 300 feet and live up to 2,000 years, or the giant sequoias so wide that park visitors can drive through a toppled one at Yosemite National Park.

Yet Brogan continues to hear about Vermont trees to add to the big tree list. She drove to Strafford in April and hiked 20 minutes up a mountain to see a red oak. "It is amazing. It's probably 400 years. It was old when they logged that forest 100 years ago. It was too old for them to find a mill that could use the wood, so they left it and it's just incredibly more old. It's just from another era."

The state's oldest tree is believed to be a 500-year-old hemlock in the mountainous forest of Camel's Hump in Buel's Gore. That's far beyond the average life span of 136 years for a Vermont tree.

"It's a tough place to live," Brogan says of Vermont.

Disease, tough winters, ice, wind and snow storms shorten the lives of some trees in the Northeast.

Dustin Matava, 14, and his 12-year-old sister, Nealsa, likely will get nostalgic about the black willow in their front yard when they grow up. Since they were small they've always called it the big tree.

It took the family days to spruce up the tree this spring after a poplar blew over during the winter and landed on the willow. But the Matavas want their willow to look its best for the people who drive by and gawk or take pictures. Three to four cars a day stop during the summer.